APPROACH TO ENGAGEMENTS

At F&W, our engagements begin with an understanding of your organization, its operating and tax structure, and your key financial goals and objectives. Then our procedures are guided by a risk-based approach that is proven to be both cost effective and meaningful for our clientele. Although the level of service that you may require will vary, whether it is an audit, review, compilation of financial statement or tax planning or return preparation, we use our diverse experience and technical capabilities to guide us regardless of the nature of the engagement. We want to ensure that our services concentrate on matters that are significant to your operations and that coincidently provide us with the best opportunity to make the most significant improvements to the financial management of your organization. We also reassess the effectiveness of our procedures as our engagements transpire while ensuring that we uphold the highest level of ethical and professional standards. Our approach helps to ensure the reliability of your financial statements and tax returns and also helps assure that our recommendations are practical and useful.

Results Oriented

We take balanced approach to our engagements. At F&W, our expertise is financial and accounting reporting and tax advisory services, but we do not operate in a vacuum. Our diverse client base provides us with experience to help assess the performance of organizations with varying sizes, operating structures, and tax structures. Most importantly our diverse experience and backgrounds provide you with pertinent feedback to help you make better decisions.

Therefore, we tailor our services to look for opportunities to link financial data with other non-traditional, non-financial information, which may even reside outside of the finance department or accounting system. Our approach is proven to provide management with information that is more useful and will help management develop measurements designed to assess performance and the effectiveness of your organization in meeting its stated mission, goals and objectives.

Cost Effective and Flexible

To ensure cost effectiveness of our services, we understand that we must be flexible and willing to adapt to dynamic situations as they evolve. To achieve this we begin by spending sufficient time planning each engagement and gaining an understanding of your organization and its operating and tax structure. During the planning phase of an engagement, we perform detailed analytical procedures on significant account balances and transaction classes and couple them with insightful inquiries of key personnel involved in the accounting cycle. We also take the time to walk through significant account transactions to ensure that we understand how financial data is processed and reported by the accounting system. Additionally, during engagement planning, our professionals are actively involved and committed to the following engagement planning standards:

• Staff is selected with care to ensure that they are familiar with your industry;
• Senior managers are actively involved in each phase of the audit engagement;
• Engagements are planned in close collaboration with client management;
• Engagements are planned and coordinated to minimize disruption to client operations;
• Engagement managers ensure that our efforts concentrate on areas with greatest risk;
• Our professionals maintain open lines of communication with client management; and
• We document your internal controls and if we plan to rely upon them, we test them.

Reliable and Dependable

We enhance the reliability and dependability of our services by ensuring that we remain objective and that our professionals are truly independent and free from any potential conflict that may impair their judgment. At F&W, we are so dedicated to remaining both independent in fact and in appearance. This is why there are certain services that we do not even entertain offering our clients because of potential or perceived conflicts of interest. Our reliability and dependability is more important than trying to offer services outside of our expertise.

F&W is dedicated to the original idea that our clients want an honest and independent assessment of their financial or tax condition. Our professionals desire to make our services and insight meaningful and valued by management, shareholders and Boards of Directors, and to accomplish this we fully understand that we must be reliable and dependable. Thus, our senior professionals are actively involved in each phase of our engagement, especially its execution, and are committed to working on-site in your office at your convenience. These seasoned professionals treat each engagement as an opportunity to increase the value of our firm to your organization and prove the reliability and dependability of our professional services.

Proactive and Progressive

At F&W, we realize that in order to remain competitive in an ever-increasing dynamic market place we must be proactive and progressive in our thinking and in implementing new and exciting technologies, ideas, and methodologies. We fully realize that although we are working with historical information in most cases, whether financial or tax reporting, our clients look to us for leading indicators of their financial viability or potential pitfalls. We understand being progressive in our thinking does not mean that we are fortune tellers or futurists but that we have enough understanding of the present to see clearly what is on the horizon and to help guide you toward your financial goals. Our professionals are trained to move management from working in your organization to working on your organization and improving its financial management.

Our professionals personally challenge themselves and each other to seek out opportunities to build relationships with your organization by making themselves valuable to your organization. To ensure we accomplish our objectives, we hire technically competent individuals that not only know their stuff but also know how to communicate effectively. Additionally, our skilled professionals are trained in the latest business and management practices and skilled in facilitating change and monitoring improvement in your organization to ensure your success today and tomorrow.

Practical and Sensible

During execution of our services, we continually reevaluate our initial assessments based upon the results of our engagement to ensure our services are both practical and sensible in light of the engagement’s objectives and our commitment to client service and professional standards. We continually perform analysis and other procedures determined by the nature and objective of the engagement to afford us the best opportunity to make practical, sensible recommendations that can improve and impact your organization today.

At F&W, since it is our sincere desire for our professional services to exceed your expectations, we periodically step back and reassess our progress on the engagement and determine if we are really being practical and sensible both in our approach and in our execution. We look at any variance from the norm or expected results and investigate any material deviation or unexpected result. Before drawing any conclusions, we perform final analytical procedures to ensure the numbers make sense and that we have covered all of the bases.

We determine if the accounting system or tax return communicates practical and sensible financial data reasonable with those anticipated during our initial planning and detailed analysis of your financial and tax reporting systems. Prior to finalizing our product, we ask ourselves if the numbers make sense. Our professionals are trained to be practical and sensible which ensure that our services and deliverables effectively communicate management’s financial or tax information.